7:29 PM, February 27, 2014

James C. Brown / Andre J. Jackson/Detroit Free Press

Detroit Free Press Staff Writer

A Macomb County prosecutor says James C. Brown set out to systematically murder four Detroit women he met on Backpage.com in 2011, but his attorney argues there is no evidence to prove that he killed them.

“He had them down to a science,” Assistant Prosecutor Therese Tobin told a Circuit Court jury during closing arguments today in the murder case against the Sterling Heights man. “He took the lives of those women. His actions (indicate) a very planned, directed approach to what he was going to do. ... He wanted to do it because he enjoyed it, because he got some thrill out of it.”

But Brown’s attorney, Jeff Cojocar, said there is no evidence to support that Brown killed the women on two different dates just before Christmas 2011 and told the jury that police lied to his client and didn’t do a thorough investigation by following up on other possible suspects.

He told the jury to find Brown, 25, guilty of six of the 10 charges — disinterment and mutilation of a dead body and arson — but not murder.

The jury deliberated about two hours and asked for some exhibits before being dismissed. It is to continue deliberations at 9 a.m. Friday.

Cojocar said Brown was honest about taking the victims’ bodies in cars and leaving them in Detroit. But, Cojocar told the jury, there is no determined cause of death for the women and no evidence about the circumstances surrounding their deaths, who was present, when they died or who killed them.

“Look at the facts or lack of facts in this case,” Cojocar said. “My client admittedly was involved in Backpage.com. It doesn’t make him a murderer.”

Brown is charged with 10 counts in the deaths of Vernithea McCrary, Natasha Curtis, Demesha Hunt and Renisha Landers, whom he met through the classified advertising website Backpage.com, which is geared toward adults. He is charged with first-degree murder, disinterment and mutilation of a dead body and arson.

Brown is accused of killing the women in two separate incidents at his mother’s Sterling Heights home, loading their bodies into cars and leaving them in a blighted area in his old neighborhood in Detroit. Prosecutors said he caught rides home after dumping the women, who were found in pairs. The bodies of one pair of women were set on fire.

Wayne County medical examiners testified that they believed the women were asphyxiated or suffered an asphyxiation-type of death. Their manners of death were ruled a homicide, though a medical examiner for the defense testified Wednesday that he would have ruled their manners of death indeterminate.

Prosecutors said blood, DNA evidence and cell phone records will help prove Brown killed the women. Brown told police that he smoked marijuana with the women, had sex with some of them and passed out. When he awoke, they were dead.

Brown admitted to putting their bodies in cars and driving them to Detroit and pouring gasoline on two of the bodies in the trunk and setting it on fire.

Tobin told the jury that Brown then continued his life like “nothing happened and opened his presents on Christmas Day.”

She said Brown admits to some of the charges, that no one else was with him and that blood from one of the victims was found in his home four months after the deaths.

But Cojocar said the prosecution didn’t prove its case “beyond any reasonable doubt.”